Summary of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I heard from LaHonda Jo Morgan, who lived in Wauconda, Washington, a one-building town about 150 miles northwest of Spokane. She was convinced that Wauconda remained on the map simply because mapmakers didn’t want to leave any empty space.
#2 Being a political minority can be uncomfortable and scary. In 2000, more than eight out of ten voters in Gillespie County, Texas, voted for Bush. Two years later, Democrats prepared a float for the Fourth of July parade in Fredericksburg, but no one wanted to ride it.
#3 Voting records are not checked before houses are bought, as it is simple to figure out where a person will vote simply by looking at their home.
#4 Some people are already moving to avoid being surrounded by Republicans.

Sujets

• Politique
• Social Science
• Demography

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 23 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822539921
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Bill Bishop's The Big Sort
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I heard from LaHonda Jo Morgan, who lived in Wauconda, Washington, a one-building town about 150 miles northwest of Spokane. She was convinced that Wauconda remained on the map simply because mapmakers didn’t want to leave any empty space.

#2

Being a political minority can be uncomfortable and scary. In 2000, more than eight out of ten voters in Gillespie County, Texas, voted for Bush. Two years later, Democrats prepared a float for the Fourth of July parade in Fredericksburg, but no one wanted to ride it.

#3

Voting records are not checked before houses are bought, as it is simple to figure out where a person will vote simply by looking at their home.

#4

Some people are already moving to avoid being surrounded by Republicans.

#5

In the United States, people rarely change their party affiliation once they decide they are Democrats or Republicans. The parties represent ways of life, and people typically choose the party that most closely reflects their own sense of group self-conception.

#6

The tone of political discourse has worsened since the 1960s. More common is discord than cross-pollination.

#7

Some have argued that the American public is not particularly polarized, and that the media oversimplifies political differences.

#8

The abortion question is a great example of how the middle is supposedly wide and the fringe is supposedly narrow. However, a late 2005 poll from Cook/RT Strategies showed that the majority of Americans were in the middle when it came to abortion: they were neither strongly pro-life nor strongly pro-choice.

#9

In the 2006 midterm elections, American voters split very sharply on the war in Iraq, but those divisions extended to most other issues. Only 16 percent of Democrats supported a constitutional ban on gay marriage, while 69 percent of Republicans were strongly pro-choice.

#10

There are two explanations given for why America is so polarized: Gerrymandering, which creates overwhelmingly partisan districts, and the spread of conservative propaganda and money, which creates an interlocking structure of propaganda and money that moves the Republican Party to the right.

#11

After each of the last three redistricting cycles, there were no immediate jumps in lopsided districts. If legislative gerrymandering had caused the lopsided House, its effects had been subtle.

#12

The Democrats argue that the elections of 2000 and 2004 were the culmination of a forty-year effort by Republicans to take over America. The Republicans built a tightly wound, highly coordinated movement from the top down.

#13

The left has created the Powell memo to explain why Republicans are so successful, when really it’s because of real differences in the way people think, what they value, and how they worship.

#14

The increase in geographic polarization is due to people sorting into communities with similar values, and voting for candidates who reflect those values.

#15

The politics of place are becoming increasingly important as political celebrity continues to take center stage. While people may simply respond to the faults, successes, and foibles of political elites, politically like-minded regions practice a different kind of politics than do places with a greater mix of allegiances.

#16

Political divisions in America are as much a result of values and lifestyle as they are of income and occupation. And with those divisions has come a pervasive and growing separation between Americans.

#17

The United States is becoming more and more segregated by politics, religion, and economy.

#18

The story we’ve been told is that society cracked in 1968 as a result of protests, assassinations, and the melee in Chicago. But in reality, it was years of gradual change that led to the breakdown of old political, social, and cultural relationships.

#19

We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighborhood and church most compatible with their lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The United States was shaped by migration. Explorers found their way on foot through the Cumberland Gap. Pioneers pushed west in wagon trains. Blacks left the dismal economy and deadly culture of the cotton South in the great migration of the first half of the twentieth century.

#2

Bob Cushing and I found that Americans were segregating politically, and we wanted to know if this was linked to larger social movements. We wanted to see if geography trumped the measures normally used to designate political leanings.

#3

Once a county tipped, the gap between the parties grew larger and larger. This was especially true for Republican counties, which saw the margins for Republican presidential candidates increase over time.

#4

These findings showed that the number of counties with landslide majorities was increasing. In the extremely close election of 1976, 38 percent of the nation’s counties had a spread larger than 20 percentage points. In the extremely close election of 2004, more than 60 percent of all U. S. counties produced landslide elections.

#5

The tipping phenomenon was found to be fractal, appearing no matter how large or small the geography. Political commentators blame much of the nation’s ideological polarization on the switch in the South from Democratic to Republican.

#6

The way to calculate public opinion is to take a group and describe how this supposedly homogeneous group thinks or votes across the nation. However, in reality, Evangelicals living in counties that voted heavily for Kerry in 2004 are an entirely different breed from those living in Republican landslide counties.

#7

The four groups were tracked through time to see if they had any political coherence.